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Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

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    answer-readiness/comparison-tables

    Comparison tables present

    What it checks

    AI answer engines extract structured table data to generate comparison answers. Add HTML tables to your content where appropriate.

    Why it matters

    Expressing comparative/multi-attribute data as a real HTML table (rather than styled divs or prose) increases the probability that an answer engine extracts the comparison and cites the page for comparative queries.

    Evidence

    Comparison tables

    Tables are included in the structural bundles that measured positive. GEO-SFE’s meso-structure — lists and tables at 25–35% of content — contributed 39.7% of a 17.3% citation gain (p<0.001, −3.1pp on ablation), and Zyppy’s ‘AI-ready Structure’ factor (explicitly naming tables) scores 8.6. The mechanistic argument is decent — TableRAG-style pipelines linearize tables to Markdown, so a genuine table survives extraction as aligned rows while a div-grid comparison degrades into unlabeled text fragments. Google does require that ‘important content is available in textual form’, which a real table satisfies and an image-of-a-table does not.

    Limits

    The strongest counter-evidence in this domain. Format as a Prior measured a cross-model preference hierarchy in which ‘semantically rich formats such as texts and KGs are consistently favored over visually structured ones like infoboxes and tables’. Against plain text, tables scored 0.398, KGs 0.336 and infoboxes 0.235. Models systematically preferred prose when the same fact was available both ways. No vendor documents tables as a citation signal, and Google states there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for AI features.

    No study located isolates the causal effect of converting a styled div-grid into semantic table markup — the specific edit this audit would recommend. The widely circulated claim that ‘pages with well-structured comparison tables have a structural advantage’ traces only to SEO vendor blogs with no disclosed methodology. Keep the audit as an accessibility/extractability hygiene check (real table markup beats an image or a div grid), not as a citation-rate lever.

    Sources